The conservative civil war is older than people think

April 21, 2012 Leave a comment

Every news story, editorial, or blog post about this election has said that it will be a watershed in Alberta’s political history. The province of political dynasties is on a precipice that happens only once every few decades, and this election will either be a repeat of 1993 when the reigning dynasty was able to reinvent itself or of 1971 when even the weight of history could not withstand the winds of change.

What is this election about? From a purely political standpoint, this is a battle between the factions of the conservative movement in Canada that have been at war with each other for decade. Alison Redford is the vanguard of the possible return of Torydom to Alberta. By ‘Tory’, I do not mean the colloquial term describing Canadian conservatives in general, but the specific strain of Canadian conservatism that traces its lineage all the way back to John A. MacDonald, but is most personified by the Tories of the second half of the twentieth century like Robert Stanfield, Dalton Camp, Joe Clark, Brian Mulroney, and  Peter Lougheed. Redford is merely the latest standard-bearer of a prestigious political pedigree.

Danielle Smith and the Wildrose, on the other hand, are part of the ‘new right’, the rise of which has been ascribed to populist champion Preston Manning and his intellectual allies such as Tom Flanagan, Barry Cooper, Rainer Knopff, Stephen Harper, and, ironically, now-Tory Ted Morton. However, this western Canadian brand of conservatism is older than the 1980s, and can be traced back to prairie populists like John Diefenbaker, Ernest Manning, and William Aberhart.

(Colby Cosh’s piece on the Wildrose and Kevin Libin’s piece on Alison Redford discuss the political pedigrees of both leaders.)

The details are usually only of interest to political scientists, historians, and journalists, but suffice it to say that the 2012 Alberta Election is merely the latest flare-up of a long-standing conservative civil war. The fight between moderate Tory elites and populist and ideological conservatives does not just describe the duel between Redford’s PCs and Smith’s Wildrose but is the same battle fought by Robert Stanfield’s faction of the federal PCs against the Diefenbaker loyalists in the 1960s.

So what about the Ralph Klein years? How could Ralph’s PC party—a party that led a decade-long scorched earth campaign against the debt decried even by his successors—be the same party as that of Peter Lougheed, who started government corporations and supported the National Energy Program?

It wasn’t.

The anointed successor to Don Getty was fellow Tory Nancy Betkowski, but she was defeated by populist Ralph Klein. Ralph Klein was more of a populist than a true conservative because, though he was (in)famous for slaying the dragon that was the deficit, he was known as a Liberal before entering provincial politics, and government spending during his final term could hardly be called conservative. His populist appeal, however, remained constant throughout his political career.

Moreover, there was a zeitgeist in the 1990s of paring back the welfare state. 1993 was the peak of the Alberta Liberals, and, like Klein, opposition leader Laurence Decore also ran on a platform of deficit-slaying. One has to wonder if anything would have changed in the 1990s had Decore won; I personally believe the Liberals would have slashed-and-burned just as much as Klein did, if not moreso, just to prove that Liberals could govern austerely. This popular sentiment was seen on the federal level too, where—in one of the greatest ironies in Canadian political history–the spiritual successor of the Liberal Party’s left wing, Jean Chretien, also slashed-and-burned and led one of the most fiscally conservative governments in Canadian history during his first two terms.

But, I digress.

The battle between Redford’s PCs and Smith’s Wildrose is a proxy for the struggle between the two visions of Canadian conservatism. The former is more moderate and driven by a cadre of elites who broker between segments of society. The latter is more ideological and populist, relying on plebiscitarian mechanisms to make decisions rather than brokerage done by elites.

This tension is easily seen in the controversy over social issues that has dominated the coverage of this election campaign. In the increasing social liberalism of today, it is not surprising that social conservatives have made their home in populist parties. As the members of the new right have argued, (ironically, one of the biggest champions of this argument is Ted Morton) there is an alliance between Liberal elites and ‘rights-seeking’ individuals (gays, feminists, environmentalists, etc.) to use the courts to bypass the usual legislative channels in order to achieve social change and expand the welfare state to provide service to the aforementioned groups. Thus, while libertarians, social conservatives, and fiscal hawks may have disagreements with each other, they are united in their common opposition to the welfare state and its allies. They argue that old-school Tories, because they rely on brokerage, do not have the backbone to stand up to ‘special interests’ and that these groups do not even have to go through the courts anymore because they can simply approach a government that is all too happy to accommodate their requests.

The Tories, meanwhile, argue their support for these groups is not anything revolutionary, but simply an acceptance that society has changed. Furthermore, as the Tories are more typified by technocratic governance through elites, academics, and professionals rather than the ‘common sense governance’ advocated by populists, Tories more readily accept the intellectual push for change that tends to predate popular acceptance.

Anyone who has been following Alberta politics has seen Redford’s technocratic tendencies and Smith’s repeated invocation of the populist mantra of ‘common sense politics’.

Progressive ‘conservatives’ versus ‘real’ conservatives.

Elites versus populists.

Brokerage versus direct democracy.

Technocracy versus common sense.

No matter how you describe it, the Alberta 2012 election is another chapter in the long-standing internal rivalry within the Canadian conservative movement—a rivalry that has been a civil war since the post-Diefenbaker days, and a rivalry that was only recently pacified at the federal level when the Canadian Alliance absorbed the Progressive Conservatives in 2003. Which side will win in Alberta remains to be seen. Toryism outside of the Maritimes is confined to Alberta and Manitoba. Elsewhere, it has had to ally with the Liberals (as is the case in British Columbia and Saskatchewan) or has been taken over by the new right altogether, as is the case with the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party.

Popular interest in politics might wane after April 23, 2012, but the followers, practitioners, and students of politics will watch with interest as the two conservative factions continue to do battle in Alberta’s 28th Legislative Assembly.

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Danielle Smith versus the social conservatives

April 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Wildrose leader Danielle Smith continues to come under fire for not doing more to reign in (or expel outright) controversial candidates such as Allan Hunsperger and Ron Leech. In the rush to discuss the ethics of Smith’s inaction, there seems to be little discussion of the motivations thereof, so here is another post about the inside baseball that goes on in politics.

Before I begin, I want to emphasize that the discussion of the ethics of Smith’s response is a very important one. I write about the backroom dynamics because they are another layer of politics that can explain—though not necessarily ‘justify’—why certain political actions do or not happen. I am not saying that the backroom dynamics are more important, but that they cannot be ignored.

From a purely political and strategic perspective, Hunsperger and Leech’s comments could cost the Wildrose the election. The PCs have tried from the onset of the election campaign to attack Smith on hot-button social issues. The attacks have largely failed against Smith, given her well-known social libertarianism. However, the Wildrose’s candidates were wild cards, and Canadian politics has several examples of staunch conservatives putting their feet in their mouths because they either had poor media training and well-meaning statements came out sideways, or in a few cases, they were actually bigots. Alberta Liberal leader’s ill-fated foray into the abortion issue in 1993 is well-known, but it seems that Hunsperger and Leech forgot that homosexuality and race on the same list of ‘topics banned from election campaigns’ as abortion. Thus. the hits the PC campaign could not land on Smith ended up being self-inflicted by the Wildrose’s own candidates. One would think that the sin of torpedoing your party’s election campaign merits some sort of sanction, but none has come.

My best guess is that Smith is afraid of her party’s rank-and-file, and throwing prominent, albeit inarticulate, social conservatives under the bus would risk a leadership review and possible expulsion from her post. Given their populist nature, the Wildrose constitution has easy mechanisms for both the party and the caucus to compel, restrain, or even depose the leader, and I would bet on the social conservatives being able to outmaneuver and out-muscle the libertarians, fiscal-hawks-but-social-liberals, and disgruntled-but-not-ideological-former-Tories in the Wildrose.

If the PC-Wildrose feud is a messy divorce, then the Wildrose electoral coalition is an awkward marriage of the four aforementioned groups. While Smith won an overwhelming leadership mandate, she was elected in the midst of an economic crisis that untied the factions within the Wildrose on the common ground of economic hawkishness and antipathy towards Ed Stelmach. With Ed gone and the economy improving, the unifying forces within the Wildrose may be giving way to the long-standing divisions between the factions within the party.

Moreover, the social conservatives know that they are in the minority these days and that choosing Smith was a compromise they had to make in order to deal with the greater evil of the progressives who have taken over the PCs. Now that they can smell victory, I am sure the temptation exists to replace Smith with a more ideologically pure leader who is conservative on both sets of issues. Leader says all things that seem to mean something but really mean something else, and, “I stand by my members,” or “My members are behind me when I say…” often mean, “I was told by members to…” or “My members have threatened to depose me unless…” I will not name any names, but even casual observers of politics know of the ambitions of certain Wildrose members. Thus, do not think it so much that Smith supports Hunsperger and Leech, as much as she cannot public oppose them and hope to survive the wrath of the well-mobilized social conservatives within her party.

The irony, of course, is that the constraints imposed on Smith by social conservatives is similar to the constraints imposed on Redford by her old guard, albeit, the latter case is more of a purely political issue rather than an ideological one. If I feel up to it, I might write that post tomorrow.

Smith, and her fellow libertarian, Tom Flanagan, know that social issues are a political minefield in Canada, and the impressive discipline of the Wildrose campaign in the first three weeks are a testament to the lessons learned from Reform’s ill-disciplined 1993 federal campaign.  If the PCs do manage to complete the Hail Mary pass on Monday, the Wildrose might have to go through the same long and arduous learning process that their federal counterpart spent the better part of 11 years doing. If history is an indicator, the opportunity to change governments in Alberta only comes once every twenty years or so, and the would-be-government’s ship can easily crash on the rocks just before reaching port.

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Brains and beauty

March 25, 2012 1 Comment

Pardon the quippy title, but at least I have your attention now.

In political terms, this election is easy to describe: the natural governing party, after a period of abnormally right-wing behaviour, has returned to its centrist roots and is being opposed by a splinter faction of itself that is angry about the abnormally right-wing behaviour not being more permanent.

However, politics is a foreign thing to most people (and ideological alignments even moreso), so, to reduce this election to a single sentence in everyman terms, one could say this election is about the pretty and well-spoken lady who is trying to defeat the other lady, who is super-smart but kind of grouchy.

Alison Redford is an intellectual juggernaut, but can seem harsh and cold

The simple reality is that when a leader is pushed out, the new leader is usually selected on the basis of correcting a flaw of the previous leader. Ed Stelmach’s biggest flaw was that he was perceived to be nice-but-dumb. Alison Redford is pretty much the exact opposite, being perceived as smart-but-mean. Note that the key word in all of this is ‘perception’, as I know from my time in politics that Stelmach is smarter than he got credit for, and I know from sitting beside her at a dinner event that Redford is actually quite personable. However, perception is reality in politics, and, if you see the interactions between Redford and the press, or, better yet, if you watch Question Period, you will understand why I say Redford has the image of being smart-but-mean.

Danielle Smith, while also very intelligent, is more relaxed and friendly

Smith, on the other hand, is more known for being articulate and telegenic. She is also intelligent (people forget that she has TWO university degrees), though I have noticed that appraisals of her intelligence tend to vary depending on political allegiance, whereas Redford is universally acknowledged to be smart. As a politician, Smith is one of the best in Alberta. While she is always ‘on’, she is also always relaxed, and her approach tends to be to kill people with kindness. She often jokes with the media, and even when she indulges in some stereotypical right-wing rage, she will find a way to crack a joke and smile at the end of it. This can be seen in her use of sarcasm-laced rhetorical questions that she uses to bridge between her criticisms of the government and exposition of her own ideas.

Redford is simply an intellectual juggernaut, who displays little patience for dumb questions, factual errors and feeble minds. If Question Period is nuclear war, she maintains solid second strike capability. The opposition happily launches a first strike only to be faced with overwhelming retaliatory force. For political nerds who watch Question Period like a sports game, one can see the smack-down coming like a big hit being set up in hockey: an opposition member fumbles delivery of a question, Redford contemptuously peers out over the top of her glasses, then she stands up and delivers the hit in one of two ways: 1) “You call THAT a question??” or 2) “How DARE you?!” Her style choices of thick-framed glasses and boxy power suits give further credence to her take-no-prisoners approach.

In terms of a mass media strategy, the PCs will have to either soften Redford or make Smith seem like a reptilian-kitten-eater. If their “Danielle Smith wants drunk drivers to kill couples on their date night” ad is any indication, I think they think the latter is easier than the former. Conversely, the Wildrose are trying to preserve Smith’s ‘congeniality advantage’ over Redford, as evidenced by their “everyone says Alison Redford is terrible” ad that contrasts negative evaluations and unflattering pictures of Redford against videos of a happy and cheery Smith. Even more interesting than ads and press conferences will be the the debates, where the leaders will get a chance to interact with each other. Smith, when on the defensive, can get visibly nervous and fidgety, whereas Redford just gets angry; while neither are good, I think anger leaves a more permanent impression.

Of course, all of this is just one person’s opinion, and polling could indicate differently. Moreover, even if my assessment is correct, a lot can and will change over the course of the campaign. Smith may have a likability advantage over Redford, but that is one of the few advantages that the Wildrose have over the PCs, and one that could be lost in an air war that the Wildrose will have difficulty competing in against the government.

Finally, I want to be clear that I am not making any normative judgement about the importance of image in politics. That is a debate I stay away from. Regardless of what one may think about the worthiness of image as a criterion in determining how one votes, the reality is that it is quite important. Moreover, I am also not saying, as one MLA famously did, that women should only smile. I would just as easily make the same comments about the image dynamics of two male politicians, like the affable, but gaffe-prone John Tory and Dalton McGuinty, who has been described as wooden.

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